MESSAGE FROM GOV. SIEGELMAN: [View all]

[elleng]

I really appreciate everyone's support.

I wanted to thank Susan Bruce for her suggestion for perhaps starting another petition to the president. My thought on this is to perhaps encourage members of Congress to sign a petition, because members of Congress are just as vulnerable to being accused, indicted and convicted of quid pro quo bribery for accepting a campaign contribution, and then voting in favor of an issue supported by the donor.
Under the ruling in my case, all it would take would be a jury that could infer or imply a bribe rather than there actually having been one.
Susan, you may remember that until the judicial decision that sent me to prison, the US Supreme court had said that it took an ‘explicit agreement’, one where the terms of the agreement were asserted before one crossed the line from politics to crime where a campaign contribution was involved.

With the ruling in my case, as Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, George Will, points out in his Washington post column: http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/2012/02/09/gIQA4hy34Q_story…, the decision puts "dangerous discretion in the hands of prosecutors to criminalize politics."